Sartre’s dramatic quartet repudiates the historian’s claim to know the past

Evidence

History is not so much an account of how people in the past lived; it is the mirror in which the image of the historian herself appears. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 301 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

So it is that in later Sartre, particularly in Lucifer and the Lord and The Condemned of Altona, the play takes the form of a psychoanalysis acted out before our eyes. The essential problem of Goetz, of Frantz, is to interpret their own past, to find out just exactly what their original choice was in the first place; and the analytical instrument for such interpretation is simply Husserl’s intentionality. For if it is useless to try to determine the meaning of an act by introspection, in these later plays we proceed in reverse, on the assumption that whatever was done, whatever objective results the act in question had, must have been in some sense willed or desired by the actor himself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 433 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Historical writing reflects the historian rather than the past — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 301; Sartre’s later plays interpret acts retrospectively via their objective results — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 433

Broader Connections

• Historical writing reflects the historian rather than the past #corroborates (0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 301
• Sartre’s later plays interpret acts retrospectively via their objective results #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 433